THIS HUNGER IS SECRET: MY JOURNEYS THROUGH MENTAL ILLNESS AND WELLNESS

This Hunger Is Secret: My Journeys Through Mental Illness and Wellness chronicles my early years growing up in a family that had everything except love.  I attended Lexington High School in Massachusetts, USA, where my friends were the outcasts, the lonely, and the depressed.  My first psychiatric hospitalization was in a small community hospital in rural Vermont, USA, in 1983.  Woven into this story is my nine-month experience at a day treatment center in Boston, Massachusetts, only a couple of years previously, where I met Irene, a drug addict and alcoholic, with whom I was entangled in codependency for many years. I write about my stay at the renowned McLean Hospital, in the 1990’s, and my imprisonment at Metropolitan State Hospital in 1986.  But at the heart of this story is my hunger for acceptance, for love, for nourishment, and for God.

I don't consider This Hunger Is Secret to be a recovery story, or a story about how I overcame something, though I am certainly much, much better off at the end of the book than I am when I first become ill.  Rather, what I intended to do by writing this book was to show readers what it was like to have a mental illness and deal with it on a daily basis, how one is treated by society, by one's family, and by the mental health system.

Here are some excerpts from the book.  I hope you enjoy them:

The first chapter of This Hunger Is Secret 

from the chapter "Arrows"

from "Walking the Line"

Scrawl

Kohlrabi

To download a .pdf copy of the book, click here.

Thanks for coming to my site!  If you have particular feedback, don't hesitate to e-mail me at julie@juliegreene.name.  Do feel free to sign my Guestbook.